Construction and initial beam tests of the ATLAS tungsten forward calorimeter

Due to the severe radiation environment, the ATLAS experiment has chosen a compact tungsten/liquid argon forward hadronic calorimeter. The electrode design is unique and consists of hexagonally packed, tubular, thin gap electrodes running parallel to the beam direction. We describe the design criteria, the novel construction methods based on sintered tungsten components, and initial high energy beam tests at CERN.